My Official Status with the Military

Ok, to clear the air a bit, yes, I am getting out of the military at this time. Though this isn't necessarily permenant, in a few years, if I feel like the time is right, I might reenlist or something else. When I am done with this deployment, I will still technically have a year and a half left on my contract (serving in the IRR, inactive ready reserve) and I can still drill out that last year and a half, which I very well might.

The purpose of me getting out is more complicated then just a simple the army pissed me off by telling me to do things I found to be retarded so I just want out, its more of a look at where I am in life and more of a break from the army then anything. I just need to reassess where I'm going and find out what I want to do. Sure, I'm still young, almost 25, but there are a lot of factors I need to take into account. Such as, do I want to get married and have children? Would the military be a good place for me to work part time and raise those children with the threat of a looming deployment? A part of me wants to have kids, a part of me doesn't, but if I have them I want to have them while I'm still relatively young. Just like that part of me that wants to remain single is having a constant quarral with the part of me that wants to settle down and get married. I'm an indecisive cookie on such matters as life in the longterm. But right now, on top of focusing on whether or not I want to get married and have a family some day, I also need to have a break and focus on college and what I want to do with the rest of my life. I want to go back to school, and I learned right before I graduated with my AA that school and the army don't always mix, especially with how crazy the world is and how easy it would be to get interrupted and deployed in the middle of a semester again.

However, the part of going back to school that scares me is the part that is trying to figure out how I'm going to pay for it in the long run, because it took me a while to get out of debt and now all I have left is a couple of student loans to finish paying off and an Emergency room bill from nearly two years ago (which will be paid off as soon as I get home).

So anyway, part of this deployment was coming here and taking a year to decide where I want to go from my life from here on out. That was largely based on the military because before now the military did play an important role in my life. But maybe that was the thing, for a reservist, maybe it was playing to much of a role. Which means that now would be a good time to take a break from it and look at other avenues to approach.

Who knows, in a couple of years, after reassessing where I am in life and where I want to go from there, I might look at going back into the army and finishing out my career. Only time will tell.